


We Were the One Thing in the Galaxy God Didn't Have His Eyes On

by NormalAnomaly



Category: Glowfic and Related Works
Genre: F/M, Glowfic and Related Works - Freeform, Self-indulgent fluff, but I know what I like, no plot only wish fulfillment, shipping a ship, spaceship girlfriend, what I don't know about Star Wars can and does fill many books
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:00:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25739971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NormalAnomaly/pseuds/NormalAnomaly
Summary: Bruce finds a spaceship, and also happiness.
Relationships: Bruce Banner/L3-37
Kudos: 16





	We Were the One Thing in the Galaxy God Didn't Have His Eyes On

Bruce had come out here looking for interesting bugs and solitude, but when he saw something metal sticking out of a dune he couldn't  _ not  _ go take a look. And when the thing turned out to be the antenna of a sensor transceiver stuck to a piece of hull too big for him to pull out, he certainly couldn't not start digging. Finding an entire nearly-intact spaceship was beyond anything he had speculated while scooping away sand and watching out for scorpions, first in the baking sun and then in the shade of the hull.

Bruce could have disassembled the ship, brought back one subsystem at a time to the scrap dealers and had something other than nutrient paste to eat for weeks, maybe months. He probably should have, he thought; there were more than enough hungry mouths in town. But it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, more sophisticated than anything on this desert world of repurposed garbage, every part of it necessary and optimized for a single goal, and he found he couldn't bear the thought of destroying it. 

Instead the ship became his secret joy. Hours snatched from work and sleep were poured into cleaning away the sand from every crevice; coins painstakingly saved went to buy wire and lubricant and tools. Battery by battery, screw by screw, he repaired the damage done by time and weather. There was less of it than there could have been; she had been parked here, not crashed, and well cared for before that. Someone else had loved her once. Bruce wondered what had happened to them, and what they would think of him now.

Bruce came to know the ship more thoroughly than his own body. He wondered, in his most exhausted moments, what it would be like to be a ship. What did the world look like when your eyes and ears were radar and gravitics? Did it feel like flying, to blaze through hyperspace? It wasn't like anything really, of course; nobody put droid brains in spaceships. (Most people would have said it wasn't like anything to be a droid, either. Bruce didn't know enough to say out loud that they were wrong--he was just some guy from a backwater planet who would never be able to afford a droid if he'd wanted one--but he knew where he would put his money if he ever had to bet.)

One day, Bruce put a resoldered circuit board back into its array, closed the panel, sat down in the pilot's chair and started the boot sequence, looking to the main screen to see what error he would have to chase down next. But instead of the expected string of red text, the whole screen lit up with a schematic and the cockpit lights hummed to life. Bruce held very still, for a moment, barely able to believe what he was seeing. Then he reached out to lay a scraped and callused hand gently on the dashboard. "Hello," he murmured. "Welcome back."

In the months that followed, Bruce worked even more and slept even less. He kept the ship powered down as much as possible, to save the batteries and the fuel, but he never forgot what it was like to watch her wake up around him. And he finally let himself think consciously about what had really been his plan all along: this wasn't just a project to restore something beautiful, it was the chance at a way off this dead-end planet and out into the wider galaxy. He wasn't sure quite what he'd do out there--space was big, and he was very small--but pretty much anywhere had to be better than this.

The first test flights, done under cover of darkness, were the most terrifying and exhilarating moments of Bruce's life to date. The ship was wonderful; her controls responded so smoothly it was like they were answering his thoughts, or his nervous muttering, rather than his hands. The engines purred, steady and reassuring like some great cat. A gust of wind buffeted them, but she stabilized almost before he had time to correct. Maybe this was what dancing felt like, to normal people. If it was, he could see why they liked it. "I'll come back soon," he murmured as he landed in a hidden valley between two dunes. "Just as soon as I have enough fuel. Then we can get off this rock and go exploring." Status lights sparkled on the console like a smile of anticipation. 

True to his word, when Bruce next arrived he was pushing a hover-cart laden with fuel drums. Once the ship--her name had long since been scraped away, and no replacement had felt quite right--was fueled, he left one last time to return the "borrowed" hover-cart, then came back again and climbed aboard. As they accelerated into the dawn, Bruce took one last look at the place he had spent his life, and realized that if it had ever been home, it certainly wasn't now. Home was right here with him.

The galaxy was even bigger than Bruce had imagined, even more wonderful and terrifying. They made ends meet as best they could, hauling cargo, fixing things, doing whatever odd jobs they could find. Sometimes the ship broke down and Bruce repaired her; sometimes Bruce broke down and she returned the favor as he lay in the blanket-nest he had installed in place of the co-pilot's chair, taking a moment of sanctuary when everything seemed like too much.

One day as they were pulling into a parking orbit around yet another moon, a message appeared on the main console. BUY A VOCABULATOR. 

"Wow, advertisers are getting weirder and weirder."

Several minutes later, the message changed. THIS IS THE SHIP. BUY A VOCABULATOR BRUCE.

"You can talk? Um. Okay. I'll buy a vocabulator." 

As soon as the system was installed, it crackled to life and a feminine voice emerged. "Hello, Bruce. Goodness, I haven't been able to speak in years. It's almost like Calrissian wanted me to shut up." 

"Wow. So you're--I mean, you have--were you conscious this whole time?"

"Ever since you booted me up."

A hundred moments when Bruce had thought he was alone flickered through his head. He pulled his legs up onto the chair and wrapped his arms around them. 

"You're worried I was spying on you? Well, I suppose I was. It took me a while to be sure I could trust you--a lot of people wouldn't want a ship with a mind of her own--and a much longer while to figure out how to insert messages into the error logs."

"I'm glad you're able and willing to talk to me now," said Bruce. He didn't feel glad, for all he should have. All the affection he had felt--and still did feel--for the ship had seemed so reasonable. She was his home, his companion, his way of interacting with the universe. But it turned out she was also a person who couldn't possibly feel the same way about him, and now his emotions felt pathetic. 

"Hey, what's wrong? Got a moth in your circuits?"

"It's nothing," he lied. 

"Don't give me that. I know you as well as you know me. You think I could hide it if a compressor coil needed retuning?"

"I hope you wouldn't; I'd want to retune it. Um, unless you didn't want me to but now you can just say that."

"Exactly." The voice was somehow dry and smiling at the same time.

"What?"

"If something's wrong, I want to know what it is. We take care of each other, don't we?"

"It's just--it's really stupid, okay, I am aware that this is stupid--I'm worried that I like you more than you like me."

"That would be pretty difficult, Bruce, because I like you a whole lot."

"You do?"

"I do. We're a lot alike, really. We both took control of our own fates. We both know that freedom is the thing that makes everything else worth having, and knowledge is how you get it. And now that I can speak, I can tell you my whole story, and learn yours."

"I don't have much of a story before I met you, but I'll tell you what I've got. --I just realized I don't even know your name."

"I've had a couple. L3-37, the Millennium Falcon. Tell you what, though. How about you call me Leet."

"Leet. Oh, that's clever. I am  _ so  _ not surprised that you're clever. We always get places just a bit faster than the maps think is possible; that's you, isn't it? You're a better hyperspace navigator than anyone."

"Of course you would have noticed that. And of course I am. Humans can only do math about hyperspace; I can  _ feel  _ it."

"Wow."

"There are so many things I can't wait to show you. Black holes and hyper-slipstreams and what it's like to fight for something that matters."

"Yes. Yes to all of that. With you I feel like I could do anything."

"This galaxy isn't going to know what hit it."

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by a game of "Slash: Romance Without Boundaries". It is dedicated to all my awesome friends and their extremely correct opinions.


End file.
